Revising Thai history will not be easy for anybody!

This was a very valuable, timely article as June 24th approaches, and the topics it brings up should not only be debated on public television by the best and brightest of the land, including young students and street vendors, but should be taught in every history lesson in Thai schools.

Some of the topics are going to be easy, like Pridi Banomyong, but they weren’t always. One must never forget that Pridi was accused of regicide by the best and brightest of the land in the 1950s, and was forced to flee his homeland, never to return. Sulak Sivaraksa won’t mind my reminding the world that he himself was among the accusers at the time – he won’t mind because he is big enough to look at himself honestly, and is right to be proud of that sort of courage. Sulak has also tried so hard to set the record straight, and has never stopped apologising to the Thai people for his blindness. 

It will be interesting to see if those who still accuse Abhisit Vejajiva of shooting down his own people in 2010 will one day apologise for that slander, because the parallels are legion. Those fiery Red Shirt demonstrators who are “reclaiming” National Day for their own cause today are the same ones who tried to murder Abhisit three times in broad daylight in 2009, and who poured blood all over his house in 2010. That reminder says nothing whatever about the relative merits of Abhisit’s party either, just about his own personal quality – which is not unlike Pridi’s. For Abhisit has never once stooped to the gutter rhetoric that is the staple of his attackers, inflamed as they are by much the same wilful ignorance that blinded Sulak in his attacks upon Pridi, and which is still there in some of the primary school textbooks of Thailand.

Another topic in which ironies abound; the 1932 ‘Promoters’ were all aristocrats who were educated abroad, not at Oxford but at the Sorbonne, yet they shelved the Thai King and requisitioned almost the whole royal treasury. Do Thai children get to hear about that – that there was no king from 1932 to 1948? One of the reformers in particular, Baw Phibunsongkhram, invented most of the nationalist myths that are the staple of Thai history lessons today, and would have been a glorious shirt-wearer of some colour were he alive today. He created the modern state called ‘Thailand’, after all, wrote most of the nationalist anthems, got the children to stand up straight and salute the flag before their lessons, and the bureaucrats to wear military uniforms. And to make the message even more complicated for the Red Shirts, it was the revolutionary Promoters themselves who decided to restore the monarchy 16 years later! They didn’t give the King any new powers, but they did restore all the royal regalia, and of course the royal property that had been seized. And what an irony that that King should have become among the greatest monarchs the world has seen, not in the wars he fought or the treaties he signed, but in personal qualities as expressed in what he did for the welfare of his people in ordinary, practical ways.

Those ironies are going to be hard to discuss in the new history books, contradicting as they do the established myths of both Royalists and Red Shirts! (And should December 5 or June 24 be the National Day?) 

Lung Kip

Chiang Mai